Perhaps you have read articles here and there about the Edmonton Police Service’s new approach to identifying homicide victims, which is that they hardly ever do it. As the CBC’s Janice Johnston observed last week, the city suffered five homicides in the month of April, and our police, continuing a trend that began in January, named only one of the five victims.

The names of the other four have reached the public record anyway. Indeed, they are in Johnston’s article. In three of the cases, reporters found the names relatively easy to discover on Facebook or GoFundMe, or in the obituary section of the newspaper, or just because—and I think it is important to emphasize this one—close family members were willing to give interviews about the deceased, in order that the public might know that these people had identities, and lives, and faces, and that they were loved and appreciated.

Maybe it is a mistake for these relatives not to regard reporters as mere selfish intruders. (Reporters ARE selfish intruders.) But these particular families did not seem to regard news of a crime as personally harmful or a source of offence.

Twenty years ago, or a hundred, the idea that some murders are purely personal affairs to be cleaned up secretly would have struck everybody as outrageous and alarming. This is changing, and not just among police. But police are at the forefront of the change, and it seems quite a convenient one for them, whatever motives they claim. It is obviously easier for homicide investigators to handle a solved murder as a simple affair of accounting, without anybody prying into the background of the victim or searching for awkward patterns of crime or asking whether a homicide might have been prevented by timely action from some authority. Such as the police.

The fact of being murdered is not protected as ‘personal information’ under privacy law. The perceived ‘duty’ to not report this information is only an ethical construction.

The tradition in Alberta has been for the RCMP’s K Division, not Edmonton cops, to be the most enterprising over-interpreters of privacy law. But Alberta Mounties are now following a fairly firm “disclose by default” policy. The Edmonton police are attracting media attention for a newly conjured “rarely disclose” approach that contrasts strongly with the practice of the Calgary force.

Edmonton police chief Rod Knecht has defended the new opacity in odd ways. His department’s news releases often have the same boilerplate language at their foot now: the EPS will not name some murder victim because “it does not serve an investigative purpose, there is no risk to public safety and the EPS has a duty to protect the privacy rights of the victims and their families.”

You will notice that this is not an invocation of Alberta privacy law, per se. That law does not explicitly list the fact of having been murdered as protected “personal information,” and Calgary’s police do not treat it that way. Anyway, Knecht himself insists that while lawyers may be consulted on the decision whether to release a homicide victim’s name, police officers always have the final say. He thus cannot hide behind the law: his perceived “duty” to prevent the harm of news reporting is only an ethical construction.

Actually, since the EPS policy does not tend to prevent news reporting, and often persists in its face, it might be more accurate to put it like this: the EPS is acting, uselessly, on a newly perceived duty not to participate in the alleged harm of informing the public that some identifiable person was murdered.

Knecht said something strange to Johnston: he told her that “When we are holding back (names), sometimes it’s because the victims have asked us to hold back.” I don’t think he means that murder victims are whispering in his ear. What he seems to mean is that families of murder victims, collateral victims of violence, sometimes prefer not to have homicides discussed. As I said earlier, this contradicts the usual experience of reporters; more importantly, the April data suggest that it is, in some cases, concentrated hogwash.

But is it practical, anyway, to give family members a veto over police identification of murder victims? Despite the good work of the EPS, Edmonton has occasional street affrays and fatal stabbings of random pedestrians. If I am murdered at a train station tomorrow, will the fact of the murder be the “personal information,” effectively the intellectual property, of my mother or my sister? Will my aunts be used to break a tie? Do cousins count for more than uncles?

Is it practical to give family members a veto over police identification of murder victims?

My own wishes may seem obvious, but as what we would normally call “the victim” of a murder, I will have no vote. Only the surviving para-victims will be consulted. Or Chief Knecht will just promise us they were.

Some of us hoped that the province’s justice minister might set the EPS and its chief straight about murders being events of public relevance, not to be handled like some shameful infectious disease or bizarre act of God. Alas: on May 2, Alberta Justice Minister Kathleen Ganley was challenged in the legislature about the EPS policy, and she talked about how the Edmonton police make these difficult decisions oh so carefully, making garbled mention of “an instance of two people in the same family where the children may ultimately be harmed… by the release of that information.”

I think the minister was trying to refer to the phenomenon of domestic murder-suicide, which has nothing to do with most of the EPS’ acts of information concealment, and she did not explain why Edmonton and Calgary police follow obviously different standards if both forces are making decisions in serious, objective ways. She left the impression that she is simply ignorant of the controversy. But Edmonton Chief Knecht is now suggesting that all Alberta police should agree on a common policy toward post-homicide disclosures. Presumably he will recommend that Calgary be obligated to adopt Edmonton’s lo-info approach—the one our justice minister has now already defended in the assembly.